Samsung announced yesterday the mass production start of its 1.8 and 2.5 inch 128 Giga Bytes solid-state drives (SSDs). The technology used to create the drives is called multi-level cell (MLC) and it will also be used later this year for producing a 256 GB SSD.

The MLC technology permits the production of reliable and stable solid-state drives, and it is also used by many other manufacturers. Even though MLCs allow higher data densities, they are not as fast as single-level cells (SLC). But the reason why Samsung decided on using the first is this: "Performance wise, MLC is slower than SLC," but "what you're doing is that you're slowing down the chip to maintain reliability, " said Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung, as quoted by Cnet. 

The company explained that the high-capacity SSDs aim to satisfy most of the PC enthusiasts and business users, offering significantly larger storage capacities, faster information access and also demand less power.

Samsung presented its product as one of the markets best, with a write speed of 70 megabytes per second and a read speed of 90 MB per second. In addition to that, its life span is about 20 times longer than the average notebook hard drive, which normally lasts for about five years. It also features a 3 giga-bit-per-second interface with 64 NAND flash memory chips of 16 gigabits each.

The power consumption for Samsung’s SSD is registered at about 0.2 watts and while active, 0.5 watts.

The mass production is very likely to lead to a significant popularization of the SSDs, which will ultimately lead to a price drop, as many consider the SSD at this point as being out of reach.